r/booktube

In a change asked by no one, starting August 24th, views will now be counted the second someone even remotely passes by your video or it auto-plays unintentionally. This, according to YouTube, is so that longform views are counted the same way as Shorts views.

This is a change from previously where a view only counted if the person clicked on your video and actually sat down to watch it for a couple seconds.

For BookTube, where many of us make 20+ minute reviews, hour-long discussions, reading vlogs and multi-hour book summaries, this would make public view counts far less useful. Someone who intentionally watches an hour-long book discussion would count the same as someone who starts it and immediately clicks away.

All that will change will be your view numbers might explode at first (so that may cause a temporary dopamine rush) but a lot of that would just be empty views. They literally don't represent genuine engagement or even count towards monetization eligibility. So dumb.

I think the only ones who will benefit from this change are AI clickbait slop channels that will now be incentivized to put a whole bunch of keywords in the longform titles just to get you to click for a millisecond (because that now counts as a view even if you immediately click off) or bots who can artificially inflate view counts by doing constant refreshes on videos.

I'm pretty sure brands will be pissed off too because the dollar value they pay for every 1000 views is now worth significantly less than before now that those 1000 views might not all be legitimate.

YouTube literally making the dumbest decisions this year it seems. What do you guys think?

As I’m sure many of you have seen, YouTube recently announced that they are doubling the requirements needed to become part of the YouTube partnership program (a program where creators can make money from views on their videos).

You still need 1000 subscribers to be part of the partnership program… but now you ALSO need 8000 watch hours on long form content or 20 million views on shorts content, which is insane!

For context, you used to need 4000 watch hours or 10 million views on shorts to get monetized.

This hasn’t been confirmed, but I think the reason YouTube is doing this is to combat a lot of the AI slop on the platform that is farming 4000 watch hours worth of content for money. While this new rule does make it harder for those slop channels to get monetized, it also makes it harder for smaller human creators to get monetized.

Booktube is already a pretty niche topic on the platform. Getting people to invest 4000 hours worth of their time on book videos is tough as is for smaller creators. 8000 hours is almost ridiculous!

What are your guys’ thoughts on this??
Especially to those of you who are striving toward monetization.